Introduction: Graveyard Gothic

This introductory chapter theorises the graveyard’s persistent appeal to Gothic writers, identifying it as a heterotopic space of intergenerational confrontation replete with supernatural potential. Readings of key texts from Gothic’s first wave establish the centrality of burial spaces to the emerging Gothic mode, from the funerary sculptures and tombside denouement of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the double-coded graveyards found in Gothic spoofs and satires. The accumulated layers of meaning that the graveyard accrues marks it as an example of what Michel Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), calls a ‘heterotopia’: a space that is discursively ‘other’ due to its disturbing and transformative qualities. Here, the authors argue that the graveyard is a heterotopia characterised by temporal accumulation and discontinuity in which ideologies compete, become distorted, are repressed and re-emerge, transformed in and by different cultures and new media. It is this seemingly endless flexibility and relevance that have given the graveyard its enduring position as a key Gothic locale, and which necessitates the cross-media and international approach that characterises this volume.